Tubi, Fox Corp.’s ad-supported video-streaming service, has turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial-intelligence agent to suggest new TV shows and movies to watch — although the feature is really just a form of natural-language search.
Tubi’s Rabbit AI is powered by ChatGPT-4. The AI feature, which shows up on the bottom of Tubi’s mobile app, lets users “ask questions the same way you’d ask a friend.” For example, if you type, “Any movies that are funny about sharks?” into Rabbit AI, it will return a list of titles including “Shark Bait,” “Sharknado,” “Sharkula” and “Bigfoot vs Megalodon.” (See demo video below.) Users can then save the results onto their My List watchlist. In addition, search history is saved for future reference.
Tubi is rolling out Rabbit AI as a beta test to Tubi’s iOS mobile app for viewers across the U.S. starting
Tuesday and expects to make it widely available in the coming weeks. In addition, a Rabbit AI plugin for ChatGPT is available on OpenAI for subscribers.
The Rabbit AI name is a nod to Tubi’s faintly disturbing ad campaign launched during this year’s Super Bowl featuring gigantic, mute rabbits grabbing people and throwing them into holes in the ground with the tagline, “Find rabbit holes you didn’t know you were looking for.” Tubi claims to have the largest catalog of streaming titles among U.S. services, with more than 200,000 titles.
According to the streamer, Rabbit AI is additive to Tubi’s current suite of content-discovery tools, which are based on users’ My List entries, their likes/dislikes, and their viewing patterns of TV shows and movies. Search results from Rabbit AI that are saved onto My List or watched will be added to Tubi’s algorithm that populates recommendations on the home screen.
Blake Bassett, Tubi’s senior director of product, says that about one in five streamers binge-watch a series because it’s easier than searching for another show. “At Tubi, we’re uniquely situated to find content for viewers that’s specific to the moment they’re in because of our large library and our personalization and machine learning algorithms,” Bassett says. “With Rabbit AI, we’re making the content discovery experience fun again.”
Watch a demo of Rabbit AI in action:
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